Spent 2 years fighting with coax connectors before a coworker showed me the trick

I was always stripping too much jacket off and getting intermittent signal loss. A guy from the shop in St. Louis told me to use the compression fitting tool the same way every time and mark my strip length on the tool with a sharpie. Has anyone else had a simple habit change fix a ton of service calls for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

josephs2614d ago

Man I feel this one deep. My first year in the field I must have wasted 40 hours just fighting with those brass compression fittings. I finally switched to the orange handled compression tool and never looked back. Marking the strip length on the side of the tool with a silver sharpie saved me so much headache. Now I can do a connector in about 30 seconds flat without even thinking about it.

simon_chen10d ago

Ha! The sharpie trick is genius, I gotta try that. Speaking of the orange handled tool, @the_patricia reminded me of this time I was showing a new guy how to use one and he stripped the cable down to the copper on the first try. We still joke about it.

the_patricia14d ago

Oh man I heard this one from a buddy who does cable work in the burbs. He kept getting callbacks for the same house until he realized he was twisting the connector on too tight and crushing the inner wire. Now he just hand tightens and checks with a multimeter every time. Little things like that really do make or break your day.